Posthuman Blues

I've started 2006 in a rather misanthropic vein. Specifically, I don't see evidence that enough people care about transforming what has become a rapidly disintegrating and precarious consensus reality to make a meaningful difference. I'm not equipped to make any dire, decisive predictions, but I'd hazard -- reluctantly -- that humanity's odds for surviving the next 1,000 years are painfully low.

Our wisdom lags far behind our technological muster; our compassion is eclipsed by the artificially enforced need for short-term profit. If there is such a thing as "spirit," then it's been rendered all-but-vestigial under the weight of virulent religions.

We're distracted, obstinate and infantile -- and we've remade the planet into a caricature of our deepest psychopathologies.

But the true devil is, as always, in the details. Take John Shirley's excruciatingly observant essay, "Curmudgeon or Culture Critic?"

Even the daily papers are redesigning themselves for simplicity of absorption, offering colorful box photo "menus" to choose from. They'll be gone, soon, replaced with online newspapers, of course. And I'm just a curmudgeon to complain about that--even though looking into a screen is not as comfortable as looking at a newspaper, and even though articles in online news venues are often shorter, more simple minded. What am I, Andy Rooney over here? I'm turning into him, I'm afraid.

I play Poker, but the television fascination with the game is beginning to scare me. Young people are beginning to make it a financial goal. It's their early retirement plan. No one interviews the kids who got into it and lost their money and their parents' money; who're getting into trouble for credit card fraud so they can play Poker.

Shows on MTV about Sweet Sixteen parties. Teenagers getting --not making this up--gold and diamond encrusted Playstation consoles. Teenagers shrieking drunkenly from the roof of 200,000 dollar limosines. Interviewers cooing over rap-stars' cribs. Some of these guys made their first money beating women into going down on strangers. Now we're oohing over their "cribs".

I'd like to chalk Shirley's gripes up to a geezerly inability to cope with the new. But I share his disgust. Although 20-some years younger, I know exactly what he's talking about. (Contrary to his essay, I think my age has actually helped me perceive the ugly subsurface of contemporary media culture.)

Of course, if it were only the media we might be able to breathe a sigh of relief. But the distinction between the media and "reality" are increasingly entangled -- and this confusion overlaps and obscures the very concerns that must be addressed if we're to avoid extinction.

So I'm not encouraged about our continued reign as a dominant species. Yes, the "Singularity" is probably inevitable -- at least in some contrived cybernetic sense -- but the ability to use it to our betterment seems as distant as ever. We've dreamed our way to the dark shores of a new "entertainment state," an existential interzone where facts survive not by their capacity to change and improve but by their ability to distract.

Anesthetized, we await whatever it is we've been conditioned to expect (whether the cartoon pyrotechnics of the "Rapture" or the convenient arrival of saintly extraterrestrials), landlocked and ineffectual behind the controls of our all-terrain vehicles and video game systems. And we couldn't be happier.